For some of the thousands of Humboldt County Suddenlink customers affected by the recent string of outages caused by vandalism, having their cable, Internet and phone service disrupted was merely an inconvenience; for others, it directly affected their business or served as a "wake-up call" about life on the North Coast.

By Friday night, all Suddenlink customers affected by the outage had their service completely restored, a Suddenlink official said on Saturday.

"Any issues currently being reported are not related to the fiber cuts," Suddenlink Operations Manager Wendy Purnell wrote in an email Saturday morning to the Times-Standard.

During the outage, some customers were without service for more than 48 hours.

"For us it was a bit of a nuisance, but we have cell phones, so we could call when we needed to call," McKinleyville resident Maureen Kearns said. "I think it's a good reminder of how dependent we are, and a wake-up call we don't have as much control as we think we do."

Kearns and her husband, Robert Kammerer, were without cable, Internet and phone from Wednesday night through late Friday or early Saturday morning.

"It was really about basketball to me," Kammerer, who watches games online, said.

"It affected me because my wireless went out in my house," Arcata resident Leah Fukunaga said. "I'd like to say I was doing really important things, but I was just updating my phone."

Arcata resident Kelly Fernandes said her daughters, who were home sick, thought she stopped paying her bill.

Businesses felt the impact, as well.

Comments on the Times-Standard Facebook page indicated a dental office had no computer system, and for one individual, the outage meant catching up on business over the weekend.

The outages also created medical concerns.

"Businesses are shut down and that costs people big time. I was at Wound Care at Mad River Hospital and it was sad that they could not order new supplies as needed. Do people realize if some of us in wound care do not get our fancy wound healing supplies we could lose limbs? For some this is critical," one reader wrote on the Times-Standard Facebook page.

Another commented "Local hospitals use the Internet to securely send high resolution CT scans off to be read remotely, especially in the middle of the night. This improves read times and translates to faster decision making at the clinical level to decide treatment options for people presenting with stroke symptoms in their Emergency Rooms. So if a hospital has no Internet, it can mean delays in a treatment that might reverse the stroke if delivered in time. Time is Tissue."

According to comments posted Saturday afternoon on the Times-Standard Facebook page, some customers in Arcata and McKinleyville were still without service, or lost service again after it had been restored.

Purnell wrote that the damage totals for all four Suddenlink outages will be updated next week. She previously said that damage estimates exceeded $50,000.

On Wednesday night around 11 p.m., someone broke into an underground vault on Old Arcata Road, cut lengths of fiber optic cable and discarded them at the scene -- leaving around 10,000 customers without service in Bayside, Big Lagoon, Trinidad, Blue Lake, McKinleyville, Fieldbrook, Ferndale and parts of Arcata.

The other cuts took place in Ferndale and Trinidad.

Suddenlink announced last week that it's offering a $5,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of anyone responsible for the crimes.

The Humboldt County Sheriff's Office is pursuing several different leads, but has no new updates to report.

The sheriff's office asks anyone with information about this case or related criminal activity to call Detective Kirkpatrick of the Sheriff's Criminal Investigations Division at 268-3640 or the sheriff's office crime tip line at 268-2539.